The Illusion of Conscious Will (44 page)

14.
There are a number of other examples of ideas popping up in fiction that quickly become major cultural myths and that then seem to come back as “real events” through reports by people who have come to accept imagined experiences of these events as real. People began talking about “satanic cults” and “satanic ritual abuse” in the 1980s, for example, and fears of such goings-on rapidly wound up fueling dramatic accounts of atrocities despite the fact that there is almost no verifiable evidence of such activity anywhere in North America (Ofshe and Watters 1994; Victor 1993). We also now have an astonishing number of people who report having been abducted by aliens, usually to have their genitals examined and anus probed (Newman and Baumeister 1996). No one has yet explained why the aliens are so darned interested in these things, but the image of this occurrence seems interesting enough to people that it flickers into “reality” with remarkable frequency. Susan Blackmore (1999) describes the imagined experiences as “memeplexes,” sets of ideas that live and die by evolutionary principles in the environment of human thought and communication. Her account is the best I’ve seen.

There are some other potential indications of the reality of DID: Different personalities or alters may have different bodily states. Some of the most convincing evidence suggests through eye exams that different alters may have different levels of visual acuity (Miller 1989; Miller, Blackburn et al. 1991). One may be myopic and another may have perfect vision. There is also some evidence that handedness and manual dexterity can vary among alters (Henninger 1992; Schenk and Bear 1981). But repeated investigations looking for differences in EEG patterns between personalities have yielded no consistent results (Brown 1994). Instead, there is some evidence that patients merely relax and so show EEG alpha patterns as they switch between personalities (Cocores, Bender, and McBride 1984). Studies examining cerebral evoked potential responses have shown some changes between personalities, as have some studies looking at respiratory and heart rates, but the evidence for these psychophysiological disparities between personalities must be viewed as mixed (Brown 1994). It is not clear that someone merely pretending to have another personality could not show the same kinds of changes.

Evidence on amnesia is also unclear. Studies of memory sharing among personalities indicate that the conscious recall of items encountered by one alter is often seriously impaired in other alters. This could be explained as a matter of conscious faking. In studies of
implicit memory,
however, researchers have examined influences of information on behavior and performance that occur without the person’s awareness that memory is being tested. In one study, for instance, one personality was shown a list of words and was asked to rate the pleasantness of each word (Nissen et al. 1988). Later, another personality was given a list of three-letter word stems, many of which could form words from the original list, and was asked to complete each one with the first word that came to mind. Although most people tend to complete the stems with many words from the original list, the second personality responded with only very few such completions. When the first personality was tested later, she used many words from the pleasantness rating list. Subsequent studies of implicit memory have found that such compartmentalization occurs on some implicit tasks but not others, suggesting that the memory dissociation between personalities is real but far from complete (Eich et al. 1997).

Another hard-to-interpret set of findings concerns how people develop multiple personalities in the first place. The main researchers in the field hold that the development of dissociative identities is linked with the occurrence of early psychological trauma. In patients diagnosed with DID, the prevalence of early trauma (such as physical or sexual abuse, extreme neglect, chronic pain, incest, or witnessing violent death) is reported to be more than 80 percent (Coons and Milstein 1986; Kluft 1987; Putnam et al. 1986). These studies have not independently verified the traumas, however, relying instead on therapist reports. Some investigators nonetheless claim that the relation is so strong that the occurrence of early trauma should be understood as a defining feature of the syndrome (Ross 1989). Others note, though, that both DID and traumatic early abuse are dramatic and salient phenomena that may appear to be linked merely because their co-occurrences are even more dramatic and distinctive (Tillman, Nash, and Lerner 1994). It is particularly curious, for example, that while early abuse and trauma are especially prevalent in low-income households, cases of multiple personality occur almost exclusively among people of middle income (Acocella 1999).

In the same way that Freud came to question the validity of reports of early sexual abuse in his psychoanalytic cases (his abandonment of the “seduction theory”; Masson 1984), we can wonder whether the reports of such abuse in DID are true. Prince (1906) mentions trauma only in passing in his comments on Miss Beauchamp, and the major early review of multiple personality by Taylor and Martin (1944) did not note any special role of trauma. Suggestions of traumatic origins have coincided with the widespread media coverage of multiple personalities through reports of Eve and Sybil, and it may be that these stories have promoted a cultural theory that has grasped the imagination of therapists and their clients alike (Acocella 1999). People susceptible to the development of multiple personalities may be particularly prone to confabulate such reports, and research is only now beginning to examine the degree to which early traumas can be verified independently.

It does make some theoretical sense, however, to view traumatic experience as a potentially powerful motivator behind the profound re-arrangement of mind that seems to occur in DID. Perhaps when people are in the process of developing their sense of will and perception of themselves as agents, there is still some fluidity or instability in the system whereby the self is constructed. If extreme traumas are visited upon the individual, as viewed through the lens of this early virtual agent, an effective way of blunting or avoiding thoughts of the traumas might be the construction of an alternative virtual agent, one that is “not there” during the trauma. Some victims of trauma report being “away” or “floating above” the scene, and this could be the first step in the development of an alternative sense of virtual agency. Once the trick is learned, then, the production of yet other personalities could become a standard way to respond to new or difficult situations.

What should we conclude? The occurrence of multiple personalities among troubled people seems to be a real phenomenon in one important sense. Like people who report unconscious spirit possession and trance channeling, a person with multiple personalities offers reports of amnesia and involuntary control by other personalities. These reports are accompanied by behaviors suggesting that these experiences are very real for the person (Gleaves 1996). Questions of how the person reached this pass—through a natural response to trauma or by responding to the earnest suggestions of therapists looking for the disorder—are important for understanding how it might be treated or prevented. However, these questions need not be answered at this time in order to appreciate the implications of multiple personality for the topic of conscious will.

The phenomena of dissociative identity disorder remind us that our familiar subjective sense of being and doing are open to remarkable transformations. The self is not locked into place somewhere an inch or so behind our eyes, a fixture in the mind. Rather, the agent self is a fabrication put in place by the mechanisms of thought, a virtual agent that has experiences and feels as though it is doing things but that could conceivably be replaced by some other virtual agent that is implemented in the same mind. The experience of consciously willing an action is something that happens in a virtual agent, not in a brain or mind. The sense of
being an agent
creates our sense of subjective self and identity.

Personal Identity

How do you know you’re the same person this morning who went to bed in your pajamas last night? For that matter, what makes you the same person as that kid whose mouth is smeared with cake in those early birthday snapshots? If you’re convinced that in both of these cases there’s really no difficulty in fashioning an answer, here’s another question: Imagine a small part of your brain is removed and replaced with a part made in a secret brain replication facility, which copied the old part and made the new part perfectly. Would the person remaining in your body still be you? What if it were the whole brain, replaced exactly? Would that be you?
¹⁵
If not, at what point would you disappear and someone else appear? One more possibility: On
Star Trek,
you are “beamed up” by Scotty, but there is a technical hiccup in the transporter. Because of a malfunction, you are produced twice, one right next to the other. Would one copy be you and the other not you, or would both somehow have your identity? Which one would have your experiences now? The sense of personal identity and continuity that we each understand intuitively as part of subjective self turns out to be a slippery concept when examined up close.
¹⁶
These stories of brains and beamings remind us that we need to consider more carefully how personal identity is influenced by changes in virtual agency.

The essence of personal identity is memory. This was John Locke’s (1690) view and has since formed the basis of several further developments of the memory theory of identity (Grice 1941; Perry 1975).
¹⁷
If you recall or recognize at this time some experience that occurred to you at a prior time, there is a thread of personal identity linking now and then. The experience contains not only the events or episode you remember but also “you,” the rememberer. Personal identity can be understood as a chain of such links, a connection linking the “you”s over time. Not all such selves need to be linked directly to your current self for you to claim continuity of identity. If you remember yourself last weekend (e.g., shopping for peat moss) and the self who was shopping for peat moss had, at that time, remembered a self from a prior weekend singing in the shower one morning and making the dog howl, then you currently could claim to be identical not just to the peat moss self but to the shower-singing self as well, even if right now you might not recall the singing incident at all. In this way of thinking, the continuity of personal identity over time might be symbolized through a host of these various links, some massively paralleling one another in some events, others connecting the selves over time with just a few links, and yet others showing single threads linking otherwise discontinuous temporal islands of identity. As long as there is any one link between such islands of self, it can be said that the thread of personal identity is maintained.

15.
This is the same identity argument as Aristotle’s question of whether a ship that was rebuilt timber by timber would in the end be the same ship.

16.
There are excellent and entertaining discussions of personal identity that help to illustrate the issues in Hofstadter and Dennett (1981). Ethical and practical problems arising in this area are examined in depth by Radden (1996) and Wilkes (1988).

17.
Identity can be understood as having two aspects: unity and continuity. The unity of a person’s identity involves the coherence of aspects of identity at one time, whereas the continuity of identity involves linking aspects of self over time. The memory analysis examined here is primarily relevant to continuity. Questions of the unity of a person at one time are addressed in analyses of the “binding” of experience in the brain (e.g., Crick and Koch 1990) and of the psychological interrelations of brain, body, and experience (e.g., Greenwald 1982).

A break in this thread of personal identity occurs when the self has no memory of being a past self. If such a break occurs, there might be a current self that is not the same as the past self. This, then, is all that is really needed for the occurrence of a transition from one virtual agent to another. If the person experiences a self that doesn’t remember being the person’s prior self, then a new virtual agent has been created. The transition from one multiple personality to another, or from person to spirit, or from channel to channeled entity, involves the development of an agent self that simply doesn’t remember the prior agent self. The poorer the memory of past episodes that a virtual agent has, the more likely it will feel as though it has no prior identity. This lack of memory is equally important when the person moves back to the original agent self. The DID person returning to the main personality, or the channel or medium returning to the self, will experience a return to the old virtual agent that is particularly impressive when the interloper agent is not well remembered.

The memories that are related to identity are different from other kinds of memory. Identity-relevant memories involve the agent, a perspective from which the memory item was experienced. Endel Tulving (1972) distinguished such
episodic
memories from the more general class of
semantic
memories. Recalling that you ate fish for dinner last night would be an episodic memory, for example, whereas remembering that fish swim in water would be a semantic memory. Knowledge stored in semantic memory is source-free, without a conscious agent that experienced and recorded it, and such memory could easily be something that animals or babies have available in various degrees. Tulving (1985; 1999) suspects that episodic memory, however, is uniquely a characteristic of conscious human adults because of its special identity-relevance. Having memories with
who, where,
and
when
attached to them allows us to remember not only
what
. Memory for episodes brings along the self, kind of piggyback, and so allows us to make distinctions between selves we remember being and selves we do not.